With today's emphasis on “lean implementation” in business environments, manufacturing and service, companies seek to acquire tools that effectively identify problems affecting productivity and update work-in-progress process flows with newly inserted tasks. A basic philosophy of the lean implementation into a process flow is to target inefficiency and to improve economical goals, which is accomplished by focusing on determining production times that meet or exceed customer requirements. Initiatives of lean implementations typically begin with a development of a value stream map of an operation. However, the value stream map does not take into consideration a dynamic aspect of the operation and a product mix that may be in production at different times.
Six Sigma is a method, based on standard deviations, used to analyze and identify variations in process flows to provide productivity improvements. As such, some companies have integrated aspects of the six-sigma and lean tools to improve productivity in the manufacturing and service environments. However, when process map studies and simulations are required due to changes in process constraints, further off-line actions have to be undertaken such as building, verifying and validating simulation models for experimentation of improvements. These actions thus lack a dynamic aspect of integrations or modifications in model simulations.
Accordingly, a system and method is desired that can integrate and combine varied analytical and implementation tools to dynamically build, simulate and analyze processes subjected to any applicable conditions and scenarios to provide productivity improvements.